Source: The Conversation – UK – By William Yat Wai Lo, Associate Professor in Intercultural and International Education, Durham University
From climate marches to Gaza encampments, students across the globe are demanding political change. Their activism is often praised as a sign of youth empowerment and civic engagement.
But there is another side to this story. Activism can also exclude, silence, and polarise. It can amplify the voices of some, while pushing others to the margins.
My recently published study with colleague Euan Auld explored these dynamics in the context of Hong Kong’s 2019 student protests. This was a mass movement initially sparked by opposition to a proposed extradition bill, which quickly expanded into broader calls for democracy.
We interviewed 26 student leaders from 11 universities, capturing a complex picture of student politics under pressure. What we found challenges simple narratives of activism as purely empowering. Student-led organisations became not just platforms for mobilisation, but also sites of internal tension and exclusion.
This paradox – the power to empower, and the power to disempower – is a contradiction at the heart of student politics. And while Hong Kong may be a unique setting, the lessons carry broader relevance as campus protests rise around the world.
In the lead-up to and during Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, student organisations played a prominent role in the broader movement for political change. Student organisations helped shape protest strategies, coordinated campus actions, and became powerful symbols of resistance.
Our interviewees described feeling seen, heard, and united for a cause larger than themselves, with their student union involvement providing visibility. “No one would respond to my email if I was an ordinary student,” one student explained. “Being a student union executive gives me a position to make change.”
But that visibility came at a cost. As the political climate intensified, political alignment with localist viewpoints – often associated with a strong Hong Kong identity and, in some cases, pro-independence stances – became a prerequisite for leadership. In our interviews, student leaders explained that although student unions were expected to represent a wide range of student interests, from campus welfare to academic policy, their increasing focus on political advocacy meant that only candidates with strong ideological positions could credibly run for office.
“A political stance is essential to running an election for a cabinet of the student union,” said one student.
Some also described feeling significant pressure to conform to dominant narratives, often tied to a rising sense of local identity or support for more radical actions. One student reflected that “when the society stresses ‘Yung Mo’ [a confrontational stance] or the society no longer stays at this kind of ‘Wo Lei Fei’ viewpoint [a peaceful, non-violent approach], the students’ mentality changes too and they want to escalate their actions.”
This creates a difficult environment for those who don’t fully agree. Moderate voices, or students unsure of how far they wanted to go, were sometimes silenced or sidelined. “We would avoid showing our political stance publicly,” a student said, pointing to the discomfort students felt in expressing dissenting views.
Some interviewees said they chose to withdraw from student organisations altogether, fearing peer pressure, disciplinary consequences from universities, or even legal risks. The paradox is clear: the very organisations that enabled student voice also narrowed whose voices were heard.
Universities today
Hong Kong may have been a specific and high-stakes political setting, but the underlying tensions it revealed are not unique. As student protests resurface globally, university campuses have once again become contested spaces. Demands for institutional action collide with calls for neutrality and restraint.
In such polarised environments, activism can sometimes become a gatekeeping force. The louder it gets, the harder it may be for students to disagree. When political alignment becomes the price of participation, student activism risks losing what makes it meaningful: its openness to diverse perspectives.
This presents a real challenge for universities. How can they encourage political engagement without being seen to endorse one stance over another? How can they protect space for students to express themselves without letting any group dominate the conversation?
Hong Kong’s experience is a cautionary tale of how student politics can turn inward, excluding the very voices it aims to empower. But it’s also a moment to reflect. Universities have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to help keep student engagement open, inclusive, and pluralistic.
Student activism plays a vital role in challenging injustice and pushing for social change. At its best, it fosters leadership, political awareness, and a sense of collective purpose. “The campus is the epitome of society,” one student said. “If [civic engagement and study] are cut apart, then going to university becomes completely meaningless… Participating in civil society during one’s studies is very important.”
But if it only empowers those who speak the loudest or hold the most popular views, then something important is lost. The lesson from Hong Kong is not to silence activism, but to ensure that it doesn’t silence others.
William Yat Wai Lo receives funding from Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China
Recent weeks have shown – more starkly than many would wish – just how exposed the BBC has now become. The furore over revelations about Panorama’s clumsy edit of Donald Trump’s January 6 speech, and the astonishingly high-level resignations that followed, have put the UK’s public broadcaster under an intense and highly politicised spotlight.
Trump’s threat to sue the BBC has added further heat, handing fresh ammunition to those already opposed to the licence fee. It is hard to escape the sense that this could prove to be a decisive moment in the wider battle over the corporation’s future, just as the government prepares the ground for the public consultation phase of its review of BBC funding.
But moments like these are a reminder why the debate about BBC funding matters. For most of my working life, I have defended the licence fee. When I joined the corporation in 1980, I saw what shared public funding could build: a national institution paid for by all and available to all. I still believe in that ideal – even as the pressures on it intensify, and as we face the hard question of what comes next.
The BBC’s funding model, in its current form, seems unlikely to survive much longer. So viable alternatives must be considered that safeguard public service media. And many argue that the question now is not only how to fund the BBC – but also what kind of BBC we want to fund.
Former BBC director-general Tony Hall puts it neatly in the foreword to his 2025 study, The BBC: After the Licence Fee? . He argues that the debate is the wrong way round. Rather than how to pay for the BBC, we should ask what kind of BBC people want – and be honest about the trade-offs. The public needs more than headlines about BBC salaries or scandals – they need to understand what the BBC does, and what is at stake if it changes or shrinks.
A model under pressure
The licence fee was designed in a world of broadcast schedules, not personalised streaming. In 2024, 300,000 households did not renew their licence fee. Younger audiences increasingly watch TikTok, YouTube and Netflix rather than BBC channels, and many will never develop the attachment their parents and grandparents had.
Yet the BBC still plays roles that commercial services do not – and systems like this do not rebuild themselves if they collapse. You only realise their value when they are gone.
So what should replace the licence fee – and how do we protect what’s essential? In September the government published a research briefing on the future of the BBC licence fee. Here are three further potential models.
1. The hybrid subscription
This is a popular suggestion: “BBC-plus”, with core services such as news, children’s content, emergency information and so on, staying free to access by being publicly funded. Big dramas, live sport and premium content could then go behind a subscription paywall.
In theory that feels pragmatic. In practice, it risks a two-tier BBC with public service basics for all and premium content for those who can pay. And it chips away at universality – the principle that everyone, wherever they live or whatever they earn, can share the same programmes and conversations.
The BBC has always been strongest when it brings the country together. Splitting the audience into subscribers and non-subscribers weakens this shared civic space. And if the BBC becomes “just another app”, it will struggle to justify public support at all.
Whether it could compete with the big-budget dramas and films of the major streaming platforms is hard to predict. The BBC has a strong record of producing award-winning drama, and many of those global streamers now face challenges of their own. But the BBC often produces its best work when the competition is toughest.
2. The citizenship dividend
A more radical option takes inspiration from the concept of a universal basic income: each adult receiving publicly funded media credits to spend with any approved provider – from the BBC to local newsrooms, children’s media charities, Gaelic-language services and so on.
Instead of one broadcaster receiving almost all public money, the audience would decide where it goes. In theory, this could open space for regional voices, local journalists and independent creators. It would force the BBC – and others – to earn trust and to maintain what trust they’ve earned.
It also raises hard questions. Who counts as a public-service provider? Who accredits them? How do we stop political interference? But if these hurdles can be addressed, the model encourages pluralism and accountability. It matches the digital era’s instinct: people choose; institutions respond.
3. The BBC as digital public utility
This proposal moves away from treating the BBC as a content factory and revisioning it more as a form of civic infrastructure, like a public transport system or the NHS. As civic life migrates online, social cohesion may depend less on shared programming and more on shared infrastructure.
Instead of competing only on content the BBC could, for example, host civic debate spaces insulated from abuse and misinformation, invest in digital literacy and fact-checking and help rebuild local media ecosystems where “news deserts” now spread.
In this future, the BBC does not try to do everything itself. Rather, it enables others more – strengthening the democratic information system rather than dominating it.
What must not be lost
A bold BBC does not mean an uncritical one. It must be more transparent. It has to rebuild trust among audiences who feel ignored or misrepresented. It must become more open, more local, more global – and less comfortable.
But one thing must endure: the principle that trusted information and cultural life are public goods. Once lost to market logic, they do not return.
Defending the BBC as it is will not save it. Abandoning public funding will not save our public sphere. The task is more challenging than either of those arguments allow.
We must decide what kind of media future we want, and then build the system that protects it. If we get this right, the BBC can remain a shared national resource: independent, trusted and universal. If we get it wrong, it will shrink into a subscription niche – and we will all be poorer for it.
This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.
Deborah Wilson David previously worked for the BBC.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Francesco Grillo, Academic Fellow, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University
In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a spacecraft and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured astronaut to remove a life-threatening blood clot from his brain. The Academy Award-winning movie – later developed into a novel by Isaac Asimov – seemed like pure fantasy at the time. However, it anticipated what could be the next revolution in medicine: the idea that ever-smaller and more sophisticated sensors are about to enter our bodies, connecting human beings to the internet.
This “internet of beings” could be the third and ultimate phase of the internet’s evolution. After linking computers in the first phase and everyday objects in the second, global information systems would now connect directly to our organs. According to natural scientists, who recently met in Dubai for a conference titled Prototypes for Humanity, this scenario is becoming technically feasible. The impact on individuals, industries and societies will be enormous.
The idea of digitising human bodies inspires both dreams and nightmares. Some Silicon Valley billionaires fantasise about living forever, while security experts worry that the risks of hacking bodies dwarf current cybersecurity concerns. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Internet of Beings, this technology will have at least three radical consequences.
First, permanent monitoring of health conditions will make it far easier to detect diseases before they develop. Treatment costs much more than prevention, but sophisticated tracking could replace many drugs with less invasive measures – changes in diet or more personalised exercise routines.
Millions of deaths could be prevented simply by sending alerts in time. In the US alone, 170,000 of the 805,000 heart attacks each year are “silent” because people don’t recognise the symptoms.
Second, the sensors – better called biorobots, since they’ll probably be made of gel – are becoming capable of not just monitoring the body but actively healing it. They could release doses of aspirin when detecting a blood clot, or activate vaccines when viruses attack.
The mRNA vaccines developed for COVID may have opened this frontier. Advances in gene editing technologies may even lead to biorobots that can perform microsurgery with minuscule protein-made “scissors” that repair damaged DNA.
Third, and most important, medical research and drug discovery will be turned on its head. Today, scientists propose hypotheses about substances that might work against certain conditions, then test them through expensive, time-consuming trials. In the internet of beings era, the process reverses: huge databases generate patterns showing what works for a problem, and scientists work backwards to understand why. Solutions will be developed much more quickly, cheaply and precisely.
Radical transformations
The era of one-size-fits-all medicine is already ending, but the internet of beings will go much further. Each person could receive daily advice on medication doses tailored to micro-changes such as body temperature or sleep quality.
The organisation of medical research itself will transform radically. Enormous amounts of data from bodies living natural lives might reveal that some headaches are caused by how we walk, or that brains and feet influence each other in unexpected ways.
Research currently focuses on specific diseases and organs. In future, this could shift to the use of increasingly sophisticated “digital twins” – virtual models of a person’s biology that update in real time using their health data. These simulations can be used to test treatments, predict how the body will respond and explore disease before it appears. Such a shift would fundamentally change what we mean by life science.
The dream here isn’t to defeat ageing, as some transhumanists claim. It’s more concrete: making healthcare accessible to all Americans, saving the UK’s NHS, defeating cancers, reaching poorer countries and helping everyone live longer without disease.
The nightmare, however, is about losing our humanity while digitising our bodies. The internet of beings is one of the most fascinating possibilities that technology is opening up – but we need to explore it carefully. We’re resuming the voyage that humankind was travelling in those optimistic years of the 1960s, when we landed on an alien planet for the first time. Only now, the alien territory we’re exploring is ourselves.
This article was commissioned in conjunction with the Professors’ Programme, part of Prototypes for Humanity, a global initiative that showcases and accelerates academic innovation to solve social and environmental challenges. The Conversation is the media partner of Prototypes for Humanity 2025.
This article was commissioned in conjunction with the Professors’ Programme, part of Prototypes for Humanity, a global initiative that showcases and accelerates academic innovation to solve social and environmental challenges. The Conversation is the media partner of Prototypes for Humanity 2025.
Francesco Grillo is Director of Vision, The Think Tank.
The flu season has started early this year, and we are prepared for it to be a bad one. Whether you have already had a vaccine or are thinking about getting one, here are some answers to questions you may have.
Do I have to pay for the flu vaccine?
In the UK, people who are at a higher risk of becoming severely ill with the flu are prioritised for a free flu vaccine.
This includes people over the age of 65 and those who have weakened immune systems, as well as health and social care workers. It also includes people who are at high risk of passing the virus on to someone vulnerable. If you’re not on this list, you can choose to pay for a flu vaccine at some pharmacies.
Are there any groups who should not get the flu vaccine this year?
The only reason not to get the flu vaccine is if you have had a life-threatening allergy to the ingredients in the vaccine. There are different types of flu vaccines, and some use hens’ eggs in the manufacturing process. If you have an allergy to egg, let the person giving you the flu vaccine know, as they will make sure you have one that is safe for you.
How long does it take for the flu vaccine to take effect?
The flu vaccine takes about two weeks to reach peak effectiveness. Why so long? Your immune system needs time to produce the protective antibodies against the influenza viruses in the vaccine.
If I get the flu a few days after the vaccine, is it because I had the flu already?
After you catch the flu virus, it usually hides in your body for a few days before you notice any symptoms. So, it is possible to catch the flu and then get a vaccine without knowing you are infected because you haven’t developed symptoms yet.
This is just unlucky timing. While it isn’t dangerous, getting the vaccine while you have the flu may make you feel worse. If you do feel unwell with a fever, you should delay getting your flu jab until you recover.
Does a vaccine for a more virulent flu strain make you feel more unwell?
There are a few different types of flu vaccines available, but none of the jabs contain a virus that is able to attack you. Having a vaccine is a bit like showing your immune system a picture of the influenza virus so it knows what to recognise and allows you to have practice at fighting the virus before you catch it from another person.
It is normal to feel a bit unwell for 24 hours after a flu vaccine. Some years, the influenza virus causing infections is more aggressive than normal, but the “picture” of the virus in the vaccine is already weakened, so it won’t cause a stronger reaction.
Does getting COVID boosters around the same time affect the flu vaccine’s effectiveness or the risk of side-effects?
Receiving COVID and flu vaccines at the same time is safe, and both vaccines will still be effective. If people develop side-effects, they are usually very mild and can include feeling shivery and having a sore arm. This usually lasts less than 24 hours.
There is no good evidence that shows you would be more at risk of side-effects by having both vaccines at the same time compared to separately.
How long does protection typically last, and when is the optimal time to get vaccinated?
The flu vaccine will protect you for about three months. Ideally, you would get the vaccine at the start of winter so you’re protected before you’re exposed to flu. But you also don’t want it too early, or the protection might fade before winter ends. October or November is usually the optimum time for the flu jab.
If I recently had the flu, do I still need the vaccine?
Each winter, there are lots of different strains of flu circulating in the population. The flu jab is what’s called “trivalent”, which means it will protect against three different strains of influenza. If you have already had the flu this winter, it is still a good idea to get your flu vaccine because it will protect you against the other strains.
How does the vaccine work for people with weakened immune systems? Will I still get good protection?
If you have a weakened immune system, you’re at a higher risk of becoming sick with the flu. Usually, a medical condition or specific medications make it harder for your immune system to produce strong antibodies that will successfully attack the flu virus. However, immune suppression exists on a wide spectrum, and most people will still have protection from the flu vaccine despite this.
If you’re an older adult, your immune response to influenza is often less effective, so you’ll be offered a stronger dose of influenza vaccine to increase your response.
To be on the safe side, it’s important to try to avoid getting the flu in the first place. As well as staying away from people who are unwell and using measures such as face masks, you should encourage your household members and caregivers to also get a flu vaccine. This adds an extra layer of protection for you.
Why should I get vaccinated against the flu this year?
While the flu jab doesn’t stop you catching the flu, it does reduce the chance of you getting very ill. Importantly, it also reduces the chance of you passing the flu on to someone else who is vulnerable.
How do we know what strain of flu the UK is likely to get, and how well does this system work?
The flu virus constantly develops changes in proteins on its surface – the parts that are recognised by our immune systems. All year round, scientists are working together in an international team, coordinated by the World Health Organization, to predict what the virus might look like in time to make vaccines before the flu season starts.
Luckily, flu is seasonal, and not every country experiences seasons at the same time: this gives the scientists a head start. They look at the flu virus that is circulating in the southern hemisphere during winter in June and July – especially in Australia. This gives them an early idea of what the virus might be like when it moves to the northern hemisphere and begins spreading in the UK during our winter.
Information from our flu season this winter will then be used to update the flu vaccine for people in the southern hemisphere before their next winter. This cycle continues every year to try to make the flu vaccine as effective as possible.
This system usually works well, but because there is an element of unpredictability, some years the vaccine isn’t as good a match for the virus as others. Despite this, it is worth getting the vaccine even if it isn’t a perfect match, as it will still protect you from severe disease and from passing the virus on to others, more than if you were unvaccinated.
Catherine Wilson receives funding from the CSO (Chief Scientist Office), NHS Scotland.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Akhil Bhardwaj, Associate Professor (Strategy and Organisation), School of Management, University of Bath
Donald Trump’s new “Genesis Mission” initiative promises to use artificial intelligence to reinvent how science is done, in a bid to move the dial on the hardest challenges in areas like robotics, biotech and nuclear fusion.
It imagines a system in which AI designs experiments, executes them, learns from the results and continually proposes new lines of inquiry. The hope is that this will unlock dramatically higher productivity in federally funded research.
This vision fits a wider international trend, including in the UK: governments are investing heavily in AI for science, citing successes such as DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures, and is now woven into many areas of biology and drug discovery.
However, core lessons from the philosophy of science show why “automating discovery” is far harder – and riskier – than the rhetoric suggests.
The philosopher Karl Popper famously described science as a process of “bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting [them]”. Discovery, in this view, begins when researchers encounter an anomaly – a phenomenon that existing theories cannot easily explain. They then propose new hypotheses that might resolve the puzzle. Philosophers call this “abduction”: inferring to an explanation rather than merely extrapolating from previous data.
The large language models that underpin today’s AI systems mimic some patterns of abductive reasoning. But they do not possess the experience, know-how or situational understanding that human scientists draw on when reframing a problem or redefining what counts as an anomaly.
Machines excel at spotting regularities in existing data. Yet the most interesting scientific advances often occur when researchers notice what the data fails to capture – or decide that a previously ignored discrepancy is actually a clue to a new area needing investigated.
Even once a new idea is on the table, scientists must decide which theories to pursue, refine and invest scarce resources in. These choices are guided not just by immediate empirical payoffs, but virtues such as coherence with other ideas, simplicity, explanatory depth or the ability to open up fertile new research programmes.
None of these can be reduced to fixed rules. Trying to reduce them to simpler but more measurable proxies may result in prioritising projects that yield short-term gains over speculative but potentially transformative lines of inquiry. There’s also a risk of ignoring hypotheses that challenge the status quo.
Justification is not just data
Scientists assess competing theories using evidence, but philosophers have long noted that evidence alone rarely forces a single conclusion. Multiple, incompatible theories can often fit the same data, which means scientists must weigh the pros and cons of each theory, consider their underlying assumptions, and debate whether anomalies call for more data or a change of framework.
Fully automating this stage invites trouble, because algorithmic decision systems tend to hide their assumptions and compress messy tradeoffs into binary outputs: approve or deny, flag or ignore. The Dutch childcare-benefits scandal of 2021 showed how this can play out in public policy. A risk-scoring algorithm “hypothesised” and “evaluated” which families were engaging in fraud to claim benefits. It fed these “justified” conclusions into automated workflows that demanded repayment of benefits, and plunged many innocent families into financial ruin.
The same data can lead to multiple conclusions. NicoElNino
Genesis proposes to bring similar forms of automation into scientific decision chains. For instance, this could let AI agents determine which results are credible, which experiments are redundant, and which lines of inquiry should be terminated. It all raises concerns that we may not know why an agent reached a certain conclusion, whether there is an underlying bias in its programming and whether anyone is actually scrutinising the process.
Another lesson from the philosophy and history of science is that producing data is only half the story; scientists must also persuade one another that a claim is worth accepting. The Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend showed how even canonical figures such as Galileo strategically chose languages, audiences and rhetorical styles to advance new ideas.
This is not to imply that science is propaganda; the point is that knowledge becomes accepted through argument, critique and judgement by a scientist’s peers.
If AI systems begin to generate hypotheses, run experiments and even write papers with minimal human involvement, questions arise about who is actually taking responsibility for persuading the scientific community in a given field. Will journals, reviewers and funding bodies scrutinise arguments crafted by foundation models with the same scepticism they apply to human authors? Or will the aura of machine objectivity make it harder to challenge flawed methods and assumptions embedded deep in the pipeline?
Consider AlphaFold, often cited as proof that AI can “solve” major scientific problems. The system has indeed transformed structural biology (the study of the shapes of living molecules) by providing high-quality predictions for vast numbers of proteins. This has dramatically lowered the barrier to exploring how a protein’s structure affects how it works.
Genesis-style proposals risk overgeneralising from such successes, forgetting that the most scientifically useful AI systems work precisely because they are embedded in human-directed research ecologies, not because they run laboratories on their own.
Protecting what makes science special
Scientific institutions emerged partly to wrest authority away from opaque traditions, priestly castes and charismatic healers, replacing appeals to enchantment with public standards of evidence, method and critique.
Yet there has always been a kind of romance to scientific practice: the stories of eureka moments, disputes over rival theories and the collective effort to make sense of a resistant world. That romance is not mere decoration; it reflects the human capacities – curiosity, courage, stubbornness, imagination – that drive inquiry forward.
Automating science in the way Genesis envisions risks narrowing that practice to what can be captured in datasets, loss functions and workflow graphs. A more responsible path would see AI as a set of powerful instruments that remain firmly embedded within human communities of inquiry. They would ultimately support but never substitute the messy, argumentative and often unpredictable processes through which scientific knowledge is created, contested and ultimately trusted.
Akhil Bhardwaj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Your 20s can be an intense decade. In the words of Taylor Swift, those years are “happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time”. Many of us turn to literature to guide us through the highs and the lows of this formative era. We asked 20 of our academic experts to recommend the book that steered them through those ten years. And we’d love to know your pick – let us know in the comments below.
1. Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (1998)
Growing up, I didn’t have much guidance in discovering Black writers, especially not Black women writers. I’d read African classics like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross (1980), or Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), but I found it hard to connect with them.
As a young woman I was drawn to feminist and poetic writing about the body rather than political parables about places I’d never been to. That’s why Butterfly Burning – a fiercely poetic and mysteriously intimate novel – was such a revelation.
In 1997, Vera described her practice in a short essay called Writing Near the Bone. There she recalled her earliest memories of writing: being sent outside with her cousins where they would play by tracing their names in the mud and dust covering their legs. “We wrote deep into the skin and under skin where the words could not escape.” If a sentence can be a muse, this was destined to become mine.
Mathelinda Nabugodi is a lecturer in comparative literature
2. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
Do you lie awake at night wondering what it would be like to work as a butler in a magnificent British manor during the first half of the 20th century? No? Still, it’s hard to escape such thoughts while reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterful 1989 novel The Remains of the Day.
The protagonist, Stevens, strives to become a “great” butler, which – according to him – means being able to carry out his duties even in the most extreme circumstances.
Emotions have no place in that job description, which leads to tragic consequences. Stevens is unable to express his deep feelings for his colleague Miss Kenton. Nor does he question his employer Lord Darlington’s political misjudgments.
The novel is a brilliant portrayal of class divisions and restrained masculinity – alas, traits not limited to a bygone era. In many ways, these are timeless themes. We must all reflect on how we balance our inner butler in our daily lives.
Torbjörn Forslid is a professor in literary studies
No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.
The History Man is my favourite campus novel. Like most successful satires, it pinballs between funny and bleak.
It follows an academic year in the life of sociology professor Howard Kirk, his wife Barbara, students and colleagues. His alternate charming and bullying outraged moralists and feminists on the book’s release.
After the #MeToo campaign, Howard is yet more likely to be termed emotionally and sexually abusive. I read the book the year I started teaching and immediately put it on my syllabus. Some cohorts loved it, some loathed it. Either reaction from my class of 20-somethings was better than indifference.
The political and activist energy of youth will be recognisable to many in their 20s, though the book cautions readers to consider who is agitating and why. It confronts readers with unethical and unjust scenarios in workplace and social settings that, unfortunately, will still be relatable to many young people – even if, today, their responses might differ from those of the characters.
Sarah Olive is a senior lecturer in English literature
4. Palestine by Joe Sacco (1993)
I was 25 when I first read Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Drawn in serialised chapters in the early 1990s, in the wake of the first intifada and on the eve of the Oslo accords, Sacco’s non-fiction comic offers a snapshot of history that will open your eyes to the deprivations of the Israeli occupation of Gaza.
It overturned the west’s media blackout on the Palestinian experience when it was first published, and it continues to serve as urgent testimony to the suffering of civilians who have lived their whole lives under settler colonial power. Sacco maintains his self-deprecating style throughout, reflexively satirising his reader’s consumption of war and violence as entertainment and bringing the architecture of the occupied territories to life.
Palestine will make you see through to the roots of conflict and feel the thickness of history as a force that accumulates in real people’s lives – in their eyes, their bodies, their homes, their landscapes.
Dominic Davies is a Reader in English
5. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac (1843)
Reading Lost Illusions profoundly shaped my 20s. It follows Lucien de Rubempré, a poor young poet from the provinces who arrives in Paris full of idealism, believing talent alone ensures success. He soon learns that literary success in Paris depends more on corruption, social connections and birth than on merit.
The novel prepared me for my own “loss of illusions”. In my youth, I joined the 2011 India Against Corruption movement and protests in Delhi, convinced that corruption could be eradicated overnight. That movement later became a political party which now faces corruption charges. Like many young people back then, I believed in the possibility of overnight transformation, only to confront the disappointments of reality and the slow nature of change.
What makes Balzac’s novel valuable for people in their 20s is how it celebrates romantic idealism through the Cénacle (a group of idealist characters) all the while preparing readers, through Lucien’s story, for inevitable disillusionment.
Harsh Trivedi is a teaching associate in French studies
6. Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984)
I bought Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac at the Brookline Booksmith in Boston, having been stunned by the author’s other novel, Look at Me (1983). I was 25, acquisitive and impulsive, and newly caught up in the restive and wordy life of US grad school.
The protagonist, Edith Hope, is a writer of romance novels. She’s banished to the damp solitude of a Swiss hotel, with its assortment of affluent misfits, melancholics and the inveterately companionless. A hopeless affair and an abandoned wedding in her wake, Edith tries to restart her writing here, now that domesticity had been set aside like the “creditable” Chanel copy that was her bridal suit.
That novel is not written, the heart hardly mended, but she dodges another disastrous proposal. I credit this novel for teaching me the aliveness of being unhoused, benumbed, and lonely. How to be tortoise reader, not a hare, for “hares have no time to read”.
Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures
7. Never Far From Nowhere by Andrea Levy (1996)
Andrea Levy’s most acclaimed novels are those released in the early 21st century, but her 1990s novels are some of my favourites, and were important to me during my 20s.
Never Far From Nowhere is a coming-of-age story that follows sisters Olive and Vivien, born in London to Jamaican parents. The book’s perspective alternates between sisters, and readers are brought into the very different lives they lead as they navigate diasporic identities, violence, racism, colourism friendships and more.
As a Caribbean woman raised in London, this book was influential in my 20s because of the carefulness with which Levy writes characters who are raised between places and cultures, and the way she explores strategies for belonging for her “third culture” characters (“third culture” refers to people who are raised in different cultures to that of their parents). This novel, as with all of Levy’s work, probes the intimate and fluid relationship between Britain and the Caribbean through prose that is beautifully crafted and full of heart.
Leighan Renaud is a lecturer in the Department of English
8. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953)
In my 20s I undertook a PhD examining representations of war trauma in the work of American crime writer Raymond Chandler. At the time, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were intensifying, with misinformation over the so-called war on terror’s effectiveness and a lack of transparency leading to mistrust and suspicion.
The Long Goodbye – where the “long goodbye” becomes a metaphor for the slow erosion of trust, friendship and human closeness in a commodified, cynical age – fit the era well. Chandler transforms the hardboiled story into a humanist meditation on the struggle to remain moral in a corrupt and dehumanising world.
Chandler revealed a deeply moral and human-centered worldview to me, where integrity triumphed over corruption, and human flaws and weaknesses were treated with compassion and empathy. This humanistic perspective developed further in me as I watched nightly accounts of increasing military casualties. It echoed Chandler’s existential humanist concerns: how to live authentically in a world without clear moral or spiritual certainty.
Sarah Trott is a senior lecturer in American studies and history
9. The City by Valerian Pidmohylnyi (1928)
If there is one book I could recommend to any 20-year-old, it would be The City by Ukrainian writer, Valerian Pidmohylnyi. The English translation is beautifully written by Maxim Tarnawsky.
It follows an ambitious young writer who has just arrived in a capital city and has to sleep in a shed of a friend of a friend to make ends meet. He enters university and starts his path to glory, using any means necessary to get the private apartment he covets in a bohemian neighbourhood, where he imagines sitting with a morning coffee and writing a bestseller.
Whether they’re living in early 20th century Kyiv, or today’s Edinburgh or London, there are certain things that young people want – and Pidmohylnyi captures them. The novel is sharp, very honest and bitingly funny. It’s a book you need to read in your twenties, then return to it in your thirties – it will hit some very different notes a decade on.
Viktoriia Grivina is a PhD candidate in energy ethics
10. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (1988)
For many people, their 20s are their point of entry into the world of work. The lucky ones find professional fulfilment. Others, however, discover with horror that they are doing what the anthropologist David Graeber famously called “bullshit jobs”. Rather than feeling creative or empowered, they occupy one (or more) of the roles that Graeber identifies in the modern workplace: “flunkies,” “goons”, “duct tapers”, “box tickers” and “taskmasters”.
Nicholson Baker’s wonderfully distinctive short novel, The Mezzanine (1988), offers respite from such stultification. Howie, its narrator, toils as a corporate drudge. Far from letting routine work matters absorb his thoughts, however, he allows his mind to take flight, dwelling for pages at a time on esoteric things such as drinking straws, staplers and footnotes (of which, quirkily, this novel is full).
The book stages a polite rebellion against the conformist professional life. Reading it in your 20s, as soon as you start to feel such pressures, will help to keep your imagination open.
Andrew Dix is a senior lecturer in American literature and film
Did a particular book help you navigate your 20s? Let us know in the comments below.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Pets just don’t live long enough. We spend time, emotion, energy and lots of money caring for them, all while knowing we’ll invariably outlive them.
It’s unsurprising then, that with the advent of cloning technologies a growing number of people are exploring the potential of creating copies of their beloved pets.
Creating copies of special pets might be a way to keep the deep bond between person and pet alive, especially since their loss can be devastating. But is cloning our pets a good idea? Not only is cloning expensive, it potentially comes with health and welfare risks for the clones. There’s also a very high chance that your cloned pet might be nothing like your original – in personality, behaviour and appearance.
The basic principle of cloning is to make an exact genetic replica of an organism. In the same way that identical twins have the same genetic profile, animal clones are genetically identical to the “parent” animal from which the genetic material is obtained.
The process of animal cloning is called somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT. Genetic material is removed from nucleus of an individual cell, which is then transferred into an egg cell which had its nucleus removed. Under the right conditions, that egg cell can then develop into a new organism – the clone. For pet clones, the treated egg needs to be transferred into a surrogate female, who will carry and then give birth to the fully developed clone.
But while we might think that making a clone of our beloved pets would mean having an identical copy of them, cloning doesn’t work quite like that.
Yes, clones will be genetically identical – but an individual animal’s behaviour cannot be replicated. Although certain animal breeds may share common traits, their personality is also the result of their life experiences and their environmental exposures. These all impact on how genes actually function as well.
So unless you can create exactly the same maternal influences, upbringing, routines and living conditions for your cloned pet, it’s unlikely they will behave in exactly same way as your original pet.
Even the physical appearance of cloned animals can differ from the original genetic donor. This is a result of how genes are expressed. This means a clone’s coat colour might differ from the “parent”. For example, the genetic donor for the first cloned cat, “CC,” was a calico – but the clone had a brown coat.
The ethics of pet cloning
Pet cloning also raises significant ethical considerations. Our pets cannot consent to their genetic material being recovered before or after death for the production of clones.
If tissue samples are to be recovered from a living pet for future cloning potential, that might be associated with pain and distress – as well as the financial burden of a monthly storage fee for samples to be stored cryogenically.
The process of SCNT involves harvesting eggs from female animals which can be invasive, involving hormone treatment and surgery. Even pregnancy and birth can be problematic for surrogate mothers, with pregnancy loss, birth abnormalities and offspring loss relatively common – although this is also seen with natural reproduction, too. The care and welfare of egg donors and surrogate females also needs careful consideration during throughout the cloning process.
There are also potential health issues for cloned animals. One study suggested that 48% of cloned piglets died within the first month of life and cattle clones have had musculoskeletal issues, including lameness and tendon issues.
Some early evidence also suggested that clones had an increased risk of early oseteoarthritis, but more recent studies suggest this might not be the case. As clones become more numerous, our understanding of their health will improve – but at present there’s still much we don’t know.
If your pet had any genetic diseases or increased disease risk because of their genetics, then any clones will inherit these too. This means that careful consideration should be taken in any cloning decisions for long-term animal wellbeing.
Cost is also a significant concern – with cloning typically costing upwards of US$50,000 (£37,836). It is easy to see how that money could instead be used to benefit the pet population more generally – including those in shelters that are desperately seeking loving homes.
In the UK, pet cloning is not currently permitted commercially – being viewed as a form of animal experimentation. However, the process can be commenced by recovering tissue samples from the donor animal and then progressed with the support of overseas laboratories, should your bank balance allow.
Our pets are important members of our families. Cloning might initially seem the perfect way to keep them in our lives longer. But with the challenges and potential concerns attached to the process, we would be better placed devoting time, money, emotional energy into making their time with us as happy and memorable as possible. This is often the best legacy of a much loved pet.
In addition to her academic affiliation at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and support from the Institute for Knowledge Exchange Practice (IKEP) at NTU, Jacqueline Boyd is affiliated with The Royal Kennel Club (UK) through membership, as advisor to the Health Advisory Group and member of the Activities Committee. Jacqueline is a full member of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers (APDT #01583). She also writes, consults and coaches on canine matters on an independent basis.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Hayleigh Bosher, Reader in Intellectual Property Law, Brunel University of London
Artificial intelligence companies and the creative industries are locked in an ongoing battle, being played out in the courts. The thread that pulls all these lawsuits together is copyright.
There are now over 60 ongoing lawsuits in the US where creators and rightsholders are suing AI companies. Meanwhile, we have recently seen decisions in the first court cases from the UK and Germany – here’s what happened in those.
Getty Images, a global visual content creator and marketplace, sued Stability AI, an open-source generative AI company, in the UK courts. Getty claimed Stability had illegally used its content to train an AI model called Stable Diffusion. Getty is also suing Stability AI in the US and that case is on-going.
It was accepted that Getty’s images were used in the training of Stable Diffusion
without permission, and that this training involved copying. Copyright is the right to stop someone copying your work, so training an AI model on copyright-protected content without permission would be an infringement of copyright under UK law.
But the plot twist here is that the training of Stable Diffusion took place outside the UK, meaning that Getty ended up narrowing their copyright case to focus on what is called “secondary infringement” – which is essentially the same as importing goods that infringe copyright. It is illegal to bring counterfeit DVDs into the UK for the same reason.
At trial, the judge had to decide something for the first time ever. This was: if a user downloads an AI model in the UK that was illegally trained on copyrighted content in another country, does that count as secondary copyright infringement? To do so, she had to consider two things. The first was: can the definition of an “article” include intangible goods?
When someone imports a box of counterfeit DVDs, these are called “articles” under the law, and are obviously physical, tangible objects. Stability AI argued that its AI model (system) was not an “article” because it is not a physical object. The judge, sensibly, understood that the law was written long before the new era of AI, but the intention behind the rule was to include both tangible and intangible goods.
The second thing the judge had to consider was: is the Stable Diffusion AI model what copyright law calls an “infringing copy”?
The judge took this to mean the model would need to physically contain a reproduction of Getty’s content. But the way the model “learned” from the training data, according to the expert evidence, meant that it did not actually contain any copies. So, Getty lost the claim for secondary copyright infringement.
Differing interpretations
Meanwhile, one of the world’s largest collecting societies for musical works, GEMA,
filed a copyright lawsuit against the company OpenAI in Germany. This was for the use of song lyrics in its large language model ChatGPT.
On November 11 2025, the Munich court decided, like the UK court, that training AI on copyrighted content requires a licence. However, it took a different approach to interpreting the law of copying, and essentially said that since the AI model was trained on the lyrics and could reproduce them as an output, then the model had embodied the content.
Unlike the UK decision, the German court found the technical way in which the AI model does this to be irrelevant, so GEMA won the case.
One thing both courts did agree on is that the AI developers are liable for any
infringement, not – as the AI developers argued – the users who select a prompt which the model then responds to by generating content.
Although the circumstances of the cases are slightly different, the heart of the issue was the same. Do AI models reproduce copyright-protected content in their training process and in generating outputs? The German court decided they do, whereas the UK court took a different view.
Both cases could be appealed and others are underway, so things may change. But the ending we want to see is one where AI and the creative industries come together in agreement. This would preferably happen with the use of copyright licences that benefit them both.
Importantly, it would also come with the consent of – and fair payment to – creators of the content that makes both their industries go round.
Hayleigh Bosher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Even routine thrush infections may become harder to treat in the future.sruilk/ Shutterstock
Thrush is one of the most common infections in the world. It’s caused by the fungi Candida – specifically, the yeast Candida albicans. Although yeast infections are normally treated easily with antifungal drugs, a growing number of Candida species are developing resistance to these drugs – including the species that causes thrush.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 7% of all Candida blood samples tested are resistant to the antifungal drug fluconazole, the first-line drug used to treat most Candida infections.
This means there are fewer treatment options for even routine thrush infections – making them more difficult to treat. It also means that more severe Candida infections, which can occur in people who have a weakened immune system or are taking long courses of antibiotics, will become even harder to manage.
Antifungal resistance may also be contributing to the rise in recurrent thrush (thrush infections which continue to come back). This affects around 138 million women worldwide, but is expected to rise to 158 million people by 2030.
Why resistance is growing
The antifungal resistance landscape has changed dramatically over the past few decades.
In the early–to-mid 2000s, antifungal resistance was rare. Fluconazole worked well for most Candida albicans infections, less than 5% of which were resistant to it.
But Candida albicans is a highly adaptable microorganism, which can easily develop resistance to antifungals under the right conditions.
Research shows that resistance among Candida albicans has been trending upwards over the past eight years at least. A small study of patients in Egypt found that in 2024, nearly 26% of Candida albicans isolates from blood samples were resistant to fluconazole. However, more research is needed to understand whether this picture is the same worldwide.
Candida can develop resistance to antifungal drugs through genetic mutations which make them less susceptible to antifungals, or help them reduce the drug’s effectiveness.
Candida can also protect itself from antifungal drugs by forming tough biofilms. These slimy layers of fungal cells block drugs from getting in, help the fungus pump any drugs which have penetrated the barrier back out, and allow some cells to hide in a resting state until treatment is over. Candida can also alter the structure of molecules targeted by antifungals in order to prevent the drugs from binding effectively.
The key reason Candida infections are becoming harder to treat is because the fungi are adapting to survive antifungal drugs. But this resistance isn’t happening by chance. There are several factors that are contributing to the problem, including misuse and overuse of antifungal drugs (not just by people but in agriculture too) and the limited number of effective antifungal drugs that are available (which are difficult and expensive to develop).
Increasing environmental temperatures, ecological stress and fungicide use are also creating conditions that favour heat-tolerant and drug-resistant Candida strains – such as Candida auris, which is highly resistant to multiple classes of antifungal drugs, and can cause severe infection in people who have a weakened immune system.
Preventing antifungal resistance
Candida is primarily transmitted through person-to-person contact, sexual contact and contact with contaminated objects or surfaces. In healthcare settings, Candida can also spread through contaminated medical equipment and devices.
Airborne transmission is not common with Candida. However, an alarming recent study reported that species of Candida resistant to common antifungal drugs were detected in urban air samples in Hong Kong. This included Candida albicans.
The presence of Candida in air could increase the likelihood of community spread and elevate the risk of inhalation – particularly in hospitals, crowded areas or care homes with immunocompromised people. This represents a potential route of exposure that has previously been underestimated. More studies will be needed to investigate where urban Candida originates and how infectious it may be.
Candida generally doesn’t cause harm under normal conditions and if you have a healthy immune system. Maintaining a healthy micriobiome is key to protecting yourself: the beneficial bacteria in your body help keep Candida levels under control and prevent it from overgrowing and becoming problematic.
However, when the balance of your friendly bacteria is disrupted – for example, by antibiotics, poor diet, a weakened immune system or high stress – Candida can grow out of control, leading to illnesses.
Microbiome disruption can also create conditions where antifungal-resistant Candida can overgrow, form resistant biofilms and become harder to treat.
Looking after your microbiome can make a significant difference in reducing the risk of Candida and other infections. This involves eating a diverse, fibre-rich diet – including fermented foods – and limiting highly processed foods.
Only take antibiotics when prescribed. Probiotics and prebiotics may also help maintain your microbiome balance, especially after antibiotic use or recurrent infections.
While most Candida infections are treatable, drug-resistant strains and infections in vulnerable people can be serious. However, we can all do our part to prevent resistant strains from developing – including by only taking antifungal medicines exactly as prescribed, completing the full course, and maintaining good hygiene.
Manal Mohammed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Across Britain, ponds are quietly vanishing. Pouring over historic maps from the 1900s to trace old pond sites, I was struck by how many once dotted the landscape. Today, more than half have disappeared, a loss that threatens wildlife and our ability to cope with a changing climate.
That may be surprising as ponds seem small and insignificant. We talk about rivers, reservoirs and wetlands but ponds get very little mention, yet they punch far above their weight in ecological value. They store water, support biodiversity and help buffer floods and droughts. Losing them undermines both nature and our ability to adapt to climate extremes.
Restoring ponds – old and new, rural and urban – is one of the simplest, most effective steps we can take. Every pond counts, from a farm hollow to a garden bowl. Together, they form networks that wildlife needs to survive and make our landscapes more resilient to climate change.
The takeaway? Ponds do far more than look good. They link habitats, boost biodiversity and strengthen climate resilience. Restoring them is a practical, low-cost solution that begins with something as basic as adding water.
For wildlife, ponds are vital ecosystems and support far more than aquatic species. They provide water, food and habitat for pollinating insects, birds, bats and other mammals. Crucially, amphibians such as frogs and newts rely on networks of ponds close enough for them to move between. Lose that network or “pondscape”, and species vanish.
The consequences extend beyond biodiversity. Ponds act as natural buffers against climate extremes. Ponds act like natural sponges. During heavy rain, they slow water running across the ground and store this to reduce flood peaks. In periods of drought, they store water for plants and animals when streams run dry. They can also lock away carbon and filter pollutants, improving water quality.
Urban ponds in parks, school grounds and people’s gardens can provide vital biodiversity hotspots and local cooling during heatwaves. They help manage stormwater when we have heavy rains, reducing pressure on drains. And they can help connect people with nature, something proven to boost wellbeing.
Historic maps reveal a dense network of ponds that once dotted the landscape, but more than half of Britain’s ponds have disappeared since 1900. Research that I was involved in found that 58% of ponds present in 1900 were lost by 2019 in the Severn Vale region of the UK, and this went hand in hand with a decline in pond density with a 25m increase in the average distance between contemporary ponds.
The decline in ponds can be seen worldwide, driven by changes in agriculture and the growth in urban areas. As agriculture has intensified, these small waterbodies were seen as obstacles to efficiency. Farmers filled them in to create larger, machine-friendly fields, while improved drainage systems and water abstraction dried out many more. Expanding urban areas also replaced ponds with roads, housing and hard surfaces.
Bringing ponds back to life
Restoring ponds is one of the simplest, most effective ways to boost biodiversity and climate resilience. Whether it’s reviving forgotten waterbodies or creating new ones, these small habitats deliver big benefits for wildlife and communities.
The first step is knowing where ponds are and where they’re missing. Mapping today’s ponds shows the gaps, helping us plan new ones to link habitats and build a healthy pond network. Historic maps reveal lost ponds that can potentially be restored. Many ponds survive as “ghosts”.
Digging them out and restoring these is surprisingly effective. Seeds buried for decades can germinate once water returns, reviving plants thought extinct locally. In Norfolk, farmers and conservationists have restored dozens of ghost ponds, and within months they teem with life .
However, you don’t need a big conservation project to make a difference. Start small. A garden pond, even the size of a washing-up bowl, can attract frogs, insects and birds. Community groups can work with councils to revive neglected ponds in parks, public gardens or village greens. If you’ve got a garden, or even a wheelbarrow or large pot, you can help rebuild the pond network.
The Royal Horticultural Society, the UK gardening charity, has great guidance on how to create a successful wildlife pond. Every pond counts and together they create the networks wildlife needs to survive and provide vital water storage.
Britain’s ponds are disappearing fast, but every new or restored pond helps reverse that trend. Restoring old ponds and creating new ones, even in gardens and parks, is one of the simplest, most effective steps we can take to protect wildlife and adapt to climate extremes.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Lucy Clarke receives funding from Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Green Recovery Challenge Fund
